Selected Articles

I love to write about design and management. I have a lot of things to share over at Medium, but also from my older archive. For the purpose of archival, I’ll curate some of them here to let you know what my idea is about these topics. Thanks for considering to read.

I can’t stress this enough to any designer or product team. Learn, unlearn and relearn. Every product is different. Implementation-wise, you can try off-the-shelf solutions, but for product, sometimes you have to reinvent the wheel. Forget what you have learned. Unlearn. Then just like a first-grader, re-learn everything.

It’s very easy to dismiss the effort of localizing your product out of reasons like it’s not giving you any direct financial returns, it’s not measurable in any way, or it’s an unsexy, non-innovative work, or simply, nobody think they have time or expertise in it. It’s important that to know that even though you don’t have any Localization Expert in your team, you can stand up for it in any role you’re in. Love your users, not just the business.

Product hygiene is often described as basic working features that your product needs to have before adding new features. That can be true, but it subconsciously diminishes the value of the “basics”. Getting the basics right is good, but improving the basics is way better.

I’ve been experimenting with communicating design with Google Slides for well over a year now, and I have found its true value. I still do deliver prototypes and other documentations, but having a designed slide that tells your story is way better than handing off specs in the dark.

I am passionate about designing in context, especially for regional or local needs. We spend too much time generalizing the ideal of how design should be, or how a product should be. In fact, the world is abound with diversity and learning how to properly build product for the relevant markets will make your products closer to the heart of the people.